


Ghost Town

by AlterImpulse



Category: Pocket Monsters: Gold & Silver & Crystal | Pokemon Gold Silver Crystal Versions
Genre: Aging, Angst, Everyone is Dead, Gen, Ghost Town, Ghosts, Gift Fic, Kids can see ghosts, Kind of dark, Lavender Town, My First Work in This Fandom, Sad, Supernatural Elements, The Lavender Town Theory, Yet kind of bittersweet, based on meta theory, not my usual fandom, sorrowful atmosphere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 03:03:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17593391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlterImpulse/pseuds/AlterImpulse
Summary: A short ficlet about Lavender Town, inspired by the theory that the entire place is dead per the odd music. A gift fic for AllaBlakeovna and probably the first and last Pokemon story I'll write.





	Ghost Town

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AllaBlakeovna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllaBlakeovna/gifts).



The words “aging population” and “failure to accept new sources of population” seemed ordinary enough in the news reports, but their lived  _ reality _ often carried a pathos the dry, simple words did not.

Entire buildings abandoned had became entire towns abandoned as their populations moved, died, or some combination of the two. Sometimes, the towns had tried efforts to brand themselves as destinations or tourist attractions, but those invariably failed, because not enough people cared. Why should they - the larger towns, the cities, the vacation destinations with something to offer beyond “quirky small old town” all attracted more people.

Lavender Town had been recreated as such out of one such scheme. The idea of an entire town themed around its lavender crop and products had, for a brief moment, seemed a success. Fields of lavender gifting the air with a pleasant smell, everything from the buildings to the streets themselves painted in shades of purple.

Then the backlash came - the disgust at the omnipresence of lavender in scents and in food, people who had once been lavender-obsessed and gone to Lavender Town if only for their influencer photos now having moved on to the next new fad. Some who still liked the plant chose to stay in the town, but they, too, were growing old, and the former town residents had no desire to change their beloved Lavender Town to Paprika Town to cash in on the new trend.

Instead, they stayed, they farmed their beloved lavender, and those who did not care for lavender or who grew too old to care for themselves moved, while others stayed. They would wait out the changes of fickle fads, they told themselves, even as, one by one, they disappeared.

_ Our bodies may die _ , they told each other,  _ but our souls will always remain in Lavender Town. _

The town still stood, empty houses, empty streets, abandoned aside from its overgrown fields of lavender and the odd headaches some people who did wander through -explorers, squatters- felt.

It’s said children can hear sounds adults cannot, can see beings adults cannot. That even as the mind and body forms into its complete self via adulthood, its openness to other planes via sharpened senses, and the mind not self-censoring, because it does not feel the need to protect itself and its reality as strongly, both disappear.

The frequency they alone can hear, the sights they alone can see, are the world in which Lavender Town will always live.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope your birthday is happier than this fic, haha! But yeah, I never said I was good at happy stuff. Probably why I do better in the angst zone my main fandom is. Happy birthday from me anyway :)


End file.
